> usable programming language that needs to stand up to real programs for users is typically somewhere between a decade and a lifetime of work.
Still no. Wildly incorrect. There are many, many languages that were developed and deployed in production in significantly less time, including C, C#, JS, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Lua, basically any real-world language other than Rust was being used seriously in 1~2 years of development. C was written in 1972 and by 1973 an operating system was rewritten in it already.
Maybe you mean it takes a decade to develop a language where literally everything is provided for the user already and all they have to do is copypaste and smush together 1000 dependencies? If your metric is a child-friendly language like Javascript-with-npm, sure, it will take a decade to complete a full ecosystem. But getting a language to a point where it's seriously usable for people who are actually willing to write their own code, is really, truly not that hard.
Still no. Wildly incorrect. There are many, many languages that were developed and deployed in production in significantly less time, including C, C#, JS, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Lua, basically any real-world language other than Rust was being used seriously in 1~2 years of development. C was written in 1972 and by 1973 an operating system was rewritten in it already.
Maybe you mean it takes a decade to develop a language where literally everything is provided for the user already and all they have to do is copypaste and smush together 1000 dependencies? If your metric is a child-friendly language like Javascript-with-npm, sure, it will take a decade to complete a full ecosystem. But getting a language to a point where it's seriously usable for people who are actually willing to write their own code, is really, truly not that hard.